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Limited Help. Premier Alcide de Gasperi, campaigning (by airplane) up & down Italy, left no doubt that Rome's show of force was no empty gesture. With unexpected vigor, he exhorted Italians not to let themselves be scared away from the polls by Communist rough stuff. His theme: either all will vote freely, or none will vote at all. Shivering in a chill spring wind that swept across the ruins of Monte Cassino, he cried: "Form a bulwark! . . . Defend Italy. . . . Vote for Italy. . . ." In Sardinia, before stocking-capped old peasants and natty coal miners fresh from their showers, he said with imposing understatement: "I am dissatisfied with the present state of public order." Before shepherds of Frosinone, he cried: "If it is a question of force, remember the force is in the hands of the government."
There were some signs that the Communists had lost ground. One day last week at Lecce, when Red Boss Palmiro Togliatti denounced the Marshall Plan, he was booed into silence. In a sudden bullish mood, the Rome stockmarket rose higher than it had been in three months. At Gorizia, a crowd of 1,000 Italians broke up a Communist meeting, then stormed toward the nearby Yugoslav border shouting: "Long Live America, Death to Tito!" Frontier guards had to squash the impromptu invasion. Customs officials discovered a cargo of 8,000 guns, 4,000 cases of ammunition and one Communist agitator aboard a ship from Yugoslavia. On the same day, the sooth U.S. relief ship arrived. Il Giornale d'ltalia headlined the moral: "HELP FOR ITALY. FROM THE U.S., GRAIN AND COAL. FROM YUGOSLAVIA, ARMS AND AMMUNITION."
Two weeks before its fateful election, Italy was taut with the danger of civil war.